by Graham Brown
“How did it happen?”
“It’s a genetic disease,” Sonia said. “They call it progeria, or Werner syndrome. It’s caused by a defect in the way her DNA repairs itself.”
“It’s naturally occurring?” he asked.
“If you call that natural,” she said.
Hawker took a deep breath. He was damn glad to hear that Ranga hadn’t caused it, at least not directly. “What I mean is, no one did this to her?”
She looked away. “Only God, if you believe in that sort of thing.”
Hawker believed in God. He’d seen enough horror in the world to make him angry at God and wonder where He was, but he’d also seen what he considered miracles.
“Is there any way to stop it?”
Sonia smiled a half smile as tears welled up in her eyes again. She seemed lost like him, looking for answers that were not there.
“We’re trying,” was all she could say, wiping away the tears.
“We,” Hawker noted. “You and your father?”
She nodded.
“Is this what you were working on in Africa? Is that what this has all been about?”
She took a deep breath. Hawker guessed he was right, but he wanted to hear it from Sonia, he wanted to understand finally what had been hidden all this time.
“My mother died giving birth to Nadia and a year later we detected the disease in her. Father tried to convince the company he was working for to fund some research, or to allow him to use their equipment to do his own research on his own time. But no one wanted to help.”
“He worked on it anyway,” Hawker said.
“He did it without their knowledge. Maybe that was foolish, but what else could he do? When they found out, they were furious. He took the data, the samples, and what money he could and he ran. I had just finished my sophomore year at Princeton. I wanted to help. I forced him to take me with him.”
She looked to the woman piloting the boat. “Nadia went with Savi. I went with Father, first to Costa Rica and then Africa. We thought that in the right place, a place with no restrictions, we might find the answer in a year or two.”
She laughed sadly. “Didn’t exactly turn out that way.”
“That’s why he stalled in the Congo,” Hawker guessed. “He thought you were close.”
“Father always thought we were close.”
Hawker was beginning to understand Ranga’s fanaticism. He’d always wondered how a man could seem kind and good and yet knowingly endanger his daughter the way he’d endangered Sonia. But he was trying to save the more helpless of his children.
He glanced toward the forward cabin where the young girl was sleeping. “So what causes it?”
“There are different types,” she said. “In Nadia’s case, structures in her DNA that we call telomeres are rapidly shortening. We all have them. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres shorten. It happens in all of us, but in her case, they shorten far too much with each regeneration.
“Some progeria patients are affected in a different way—they don’t get cataracts or all the signs of aging—but Nadia has a form in which virtually all her cells are affected. Her telomeres are all but used up.”
“Used up?”
“Without a breakthrough, she’ll die of old age before she turns twelve,” Sonia said.
The words hit Hawker like a ton of bricks. They reminded him of another child he’d met who never had the chance to live.
“So all this,” he said. “The money, the research, the lies to people who wanted other things from him: All of that was for her?”
Sonia nodded. “Would you do any less?”
Hawker grew silent, hoping he would do as much.
With a better understanding of Ranga’s obsession and even his odd dealings with those who’d acted as benefactors, Hawker considered the current situation. Ranga had been working on something in secret. His lab in Paris proved it. But if the data Danielle found was correct and the information in Ranga’s notes was true, it sure didn’t seem like he was headed in the right direction.
Sonia’s company, Paradox, seemed to be closer, although glossy ads and a slick sales presentation didn’t mean they’d discovered the fountain of youth. And then there was the matter of trial 951.
“What about Paradox?” Hawker asked. “Your father is listed as one of the founders. Is that why he started it?”
A look of disdain came across Sonia’s face. “Father started Paradox to move money about,” she said. “I was the one who realized we could do more.”
Sonia’s aunt joined the conversation. “And he never agreed with it,” Savi said. “He told you it was too public. He said something like this would happen.”
“To him,” Sonia clarified. “There were people looking for him, not me.”
He’d obviously stumbled on some long-simmering argument. Something he didn’t have time for. “Does your company have a solution for Nadia?”
She hesitated. “Not yet,” Sonia said. “But we’re working on it.”
“So the big shindig at the top of the hotel …”
“We need funding,” she said. “No one wants to cure progeria. At least not businesspeople.”
“I would have thought—”
“Progeria is extremely rare. It would cost ten thousand times more to develop a treatment than you could ever make selling it. Even if you sold it for a million dollars per dose.”
“Can’t you get grants?” Hawker asked.
“Not with my family name,” she said. “Besides, dribs and drabs of money won’t save Nadia.”
Hawker understood. As in many other things, economics drove the bus. “So you sell the idea of eternal youth to those who might spend ten million.”
Sonia nodded back toward Dubai. “There are people in this world with money to burn. People with millions and billions that are just sitting in the bank doing nothing—even in these times. If Father taught me anything, he taught me that.”
She shrugged. It was just a fact.
“With that kind of wealth the only downside to life is that it ends.”
“This was your idea.”
“Father kept looking for someone to take pity on him,” she said. “I chose to find people who would beg us to take their money. With Paradox we’d have unlimited funding and we wouldn’t have to run or hide or lie about what we’re working on like Father always did.”
There was a new sense of pride in Sonia’s voice as she spoke. Paradox was her creation, not just another step following in her father’s footsteps. Hawker had to admit it was a brilliant move. And by basing Paradox in a nation without stringent standards or an entrenched bureaucracy like the American FDA, she and her fellow researchers could do almost anything they wanted.
“Long life equals big money,” Savi noted with some disdain. “But if it’s just for the rich, how does it make this world a better place?”
“I don’t care about the world,” Sonia said. “I care about Nadia. And Father. Paradox was their way out. It would have worked, for both of them. But now …”
Her voice trailed off as if she realized that that particular dream was shattered beyond repair.
Savi shook her head. “Your father wanted to keep the research secret. That’s why he did the things he did. Why he went through all he went through.”
“I went through it with him,” Sonia reminded her.
Savi nodded. “I’m sorry, Sonia,” she said. “He didn’t want people to live forever.”
“I heard a speech he gave once,” Hawker said. “He talked about forced sterilization, culling the herd. Was he really that radical?”
Sonia looked embarrassed at this revelation. “Father didn’t really believe in those things. He was just trying to make a point. What he wanted was birth control and responsibility and family planning.”
Savi spoke up. “When Ranga and I were children, Mr. Hawker, we traveled with our mother. She was a nurse. She went on missions to the poorest parts of the world. Slums like
Dharavi, outside Mumbai, or Kibera near Nairobi. The poor live there among filth you couldn’t imagine, crawling all over one another like ants. They survive just long enough to have more children and increase the population and suffering. Medicines and food are delivered by those who wish to help. People like our mother. And so fewer die in childbirth, fewer die in childhood, and ever more are confined to utter misery.”
Hawker remained quiet.
Savi turned toward him. “Have you ever been to a place where parents burn their children with scalding water, Mr. Hawker? Or poke their eyes out with a stick so they will be more pitiful when they go and beg? Or kill them because they cannot afford to have one more mouth to feed?”
“You’d be surprised where I’ve been,” he said, coldly.
“Then you understand why my brother spoke as he did,” she replied.
As Hawker listened he got the feeling that Savi and Sonia had practiced defending Ranga for a long time. And in a way, Hawker did understand. In the poorest, most overpopulated parts of the world, Western help in the form of medicines and food had wreaked havoc. In lands where large numbers of children were the norm because so few survived to adulthood, Western efforts had changed the equation drastically.
Where once a family had ten children and counted on two or three to become adults, now nine or ten did. Five generations used to take the population from four to twenty; now it took them to a hundred or more. There was simply not enough food or jobs or water or land for such growth.
But to pretend that only evil and misery came from such places was a conceit of the rich and a lie. He’d seen great love and affection and joy in some of the poorest places he’d ever been to.
“I’m not judging him,” Hawker said. “I’m only trying to understand. And to figure out who took his life and stop them from harming anyone else, including the three of you.”
For a second Savi looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, it’s just …”
“It’s okay,” he said, then turned to Sonia. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to your father in time. But he mentioned a breakthrough. Said he was near the answer. I think the people who killed him were after that. Do you know what it was?”
Sonia’s face brightened. Her eyes found Hawker and appeared both tremendously innocent and somehow prideful and strong and wise all at the same time.
“After years of pure research, Father decided to take a different route,” she said. “He studied animals blessed with long life spans, tortoises and parrots and things like that. And then he worked with stem cells, and compounds that could affect those stem cells.”
She glanced toward the forward cabin.
“Some of mine have been given to Nadia. They’re a part of her now. It seems to be helping.”
“And the breakthrough?”
“Father became convinced that if a genetic defect that destroyed telomeres existed in nature, then the opposite must already exist somewhere as well. He began to research stories of long life and even legends of immortality. It seemed so very odd, but he felt there would be some truth to whatever stories existed.
“He became friends with a man named Bashir, an Iranian archaeologist. They were quite a pair. Two bitter old madmen, it seemed. Father looking for immortality and Bashir chasing a dream he said he’d once lost in the desert sands.”
“What dream are we talking about here?” Hawker asked, recognizing Bashir’s name.
“Bashir’s great obsession,” she said. “Every equal of my father’s. He claimed he’d once found the grave of Adam. And clutched in Adam’s hand was a scroll of copper, which Bashir had become certain would lead him to the Garden of Eden.”
Hawker felt as if he were treading water, reaching for the bottom with his feet only to find each time that there was no ground beneath him.
“The Garden of Eden?”
“I know how it sounds,” Sonia said. “But Bashir believed they could find it, and Father believed he could save Nadia with what he would discover there.”
Hawker fought to contain his skepticism. “And what would that be?”
“A miracle from God, to some. A miracle of science, to my father,” she said. “The hope of immortality.”
He looked at her. “Immortality?”
She nodded. “In the book of Genesis, it was called the Tree of Life.”
CHAPTER 30
Scindo stood with Cruor in the same darkened room in which he had been named. He was here for a different reason now. Another man stood in front of them, an older man with gray hair and reddish brown skin. Cruor called him Bashir.
“We have something for you,” Cruor said.
“I want nothing of yours,” Bashir said.
Cruor laughed, a deep, sickly laugh.
“What I give you was never mine, but once it was yours. Or so you say.”
From Bashir’s features and accent, Scindo knew he was Middle Eastern, Persian as opposed to his own Arabian heritage. Why he was present, Scindo didn’t know; that he’d been beaten was obvious. There were bruises around his face, and he hobbled when he walked.
He was also missing an eye, but that scar was old.
“You were friends with Ranga,” Cruor said to the prisoner. “He told us what you believed.”
“You tortured it out of him.”
“This was before we caught both of you, before Ranga had betrayed us.”
“You murdered him for leaving you,” Bashir said.
“No,” Cruor said. “We punished him for betrayal.”
“What right do you have to punish anyone?” Bashir asked, straining, angry.
“We claim the right, as gods have done for millennia,” Cruor said. “Ranga understood this. He was part of it. He knew the punishment. We all know it.”
Cruor carried with him a long cardboard tube, which he placed down. Scindo did not know what lay inside.
“I won’t help you,” Bashir said. “I have been tortured before. What can you do to me that they have not already done?”
Cruor reached out and grabbed Bashir by the face, pulling him closer and examining the old scar.
“We can do worse,” he insisted. “I promise you.”
Cruor released Bashir and shoved him backward into a chair. He picked up the long cardboard tube and opened it.
Scindo had expected to see a weapon, a spear or a sword or some kind of blade. Instead what he saw looked like a thin, curved piece of metal.
Cruor placed it down on the table and began to unroll it.
Bashir stood. He moved forward slowly, as if drawn to the table.
As Scindo watched, Cruor unbent the copper sheet, rolling it out with great effort and precision. Eventually, when the sheet had been made somewhat flat, he and another man clamped the edges to the table.
Scindo stared. He saw that symbols had been pounded into the copper.
“You have been looking for this half your life,” Cruor said. “We give you a chance to read it.”
Bashir looked up.
“Be careful you do not lie to us. We will have others to check what you say.”
“Why would you care?” Bashir asked. “It’s ancient.”
“It exposes the lie,” Cruor said.
“What lie?”
“The lie of God,” Cruor said.
Bashir looked confused.
“For one small act of disobedience, God cast humanity from paradise. For one mistake He confined us to a harsh life and to certain death. Some go to heaven and some to hell, or so we are told. But if a man can live forever, he has no need for heaven or hell or the claims of a false god.”
Bashir struggled to respond, but he looked as if he did not know what to say.
“It is the first lie!” Cruor shouted. “All the other lies have come from it. Go to any corner of the world. There you will find men begging a god they cannot see for forgiveness, for life. We will not beg for what we can take … and give if we choose.”
Bashir backed away. Cruor grabbed him.
“Look
at it,” he said.
“You’re insane,” Bashir said, panicking. “All of you, more insane than those who kill for greed or lust.”
“The truth is written there!” Cruor shouted. “You said it yourself.”
“No,” Bashir said. “I will not show you.”
Cruor shoved Bashir’s head toward the scroll, slamming his face into it. “You will show us the way.”
“Go to hell,” Bashir managed.
Cruor pulled him back and struck him across the face, sending him flying into the wall.
Remaining on the floor, Bashir cowered as far from the Man of Blood as he could get.
Cruor motioned to another member of the brotherhood, who grabbed Bashir and dragged him forward. With a knife, Cruor cut Bashir’s hands free. Then, one by one, he chained them to the rails where Scindo’s hands had been cuffed days before.
“Scindo!” Cruor shouted, pointing to Bashir’s feet.
Scindo dropped to the ground and shackled Bashir’s feet. Despite the man’s struggles, he quickly pulled the straps tight so Bashir could no longer move.
“What are you doing?” Bashir shouted.
No answers.
Cruor moved toward a door. The other member of the brotherhood removed an acetylene torch from a rack and turned the handle for the gas.
With a spark, the flame lit. A jet of white and blue.
“I’ll read it,” Bashir said. “I’ll tell you what it says.”
Scindo knew it had to be done, but he felt sick inside. He looked to Cruor, who paused in the doorway as the man with the blowtorch moved up beside Bashir.
“Wait,” Cruor said.
Scindo’s heart pounded in his chest; a sense of relief swept over him. The Persian had come to his senses. Perhaps Cruor would spare him.
Cruor smiled at the man with the torch.
“Have Scindo do it,” he said with finality. “He must earn his stripes.” And then he stepped out and slammed the metal door shut.
CHAPTER 31
Hawker stared dumbfounded at Sonia. He remembered the branding on her father’s chest, the verse from Genesis. He knew that Ranga had been interested in ancient artifacts, and that Bashir had been a noted seller of such things—that’s why Danielle had gone to Beirut—but what Sonia had just told him sounded patently absurd.
